Theme Support Link

Going over the support forums lately, we are noticing some changes about how the theme author’s prefer to support their themes and many would rather provide a support on their site -vs doing this from WPORG. In addition of having different members answering the questions whether or not they are the right one.

The Scoop

To take the load from WPORG and to help authors maintain a single support site, would it be possible to give them a choice of changing the green button link “View support forum” and also “About this Theme > Support Threads” to wherever author handles the questions?

Possible way to “handle” the requests would be something along the lines of:

Support URI: http://example.com/support/

Question is for all, but without knowing what needs to be done in the “background” and if it would be possible at all.

In my opinion, if they want to provide support on their own site, then they should host their theme there as well.

Additionally, if they’re not supporting their code on wporg, then we have no metrics by which to gauge them, no data to present to users, and nothing by which users can judge the level of quality of the theme and the support by the theme author.

Chip and I had a nice Skype talk earlier this evening and we were thinking that it would be nice to ask if this is doable. Not knowing what you just mentioned and I personally understand where you’re coming from.

With that being said, how about in addition to what’s currently in, basically WPORG support and an official support, would that not be good too?

When we brought the support views to the plugins last May, this same sort of thing was brought up there as well. I tend to agree with Nacin’s response to that notion.

I’m not against helping the authors do support, but I don’t think that making it easier for them to fragment their support structures is a great idea.

If more tools are needed, then we can discuss and implement them. If more control is needed, then that’s a doable thing too. But simply allowing them to shove it all off to elsewhere isn’t a particularly great idea for the users, IMO.

People ask questions about themes and plugins on the support forums, and were doing so before we had easier forms and locations to do it and to thus categorize them properly. Our adding of the support views to plugins/themes is more of a way to help authors by getting the questions being asked to be visible to them. Removing or redirecting those links isn’t going to cause the same questions to be asked elsewhere, it’s mainly going to cause those questions that will already be on our forums to not be as visible.

One concern with a blanket statement is that we then put upsell Themes in support limbo. Themes from developers who provide commercial support options aren’t supported in the WPORG forums, but upsell Themes are permitted in the directory. So, how do those developers direct users to their support offerings?

Another concern is developers who have a thriving contributor community of their own. (Off the top of my head, Responsive and Weaver come to mind; and I’m sure there are plenty of others.) What is the point or benefit of trying to force such communities to use one support medium over another? How is the end user better-served?

I totally get the WPORG-as-hosting-not-as-listing principle, but isn’t encouraging and facilitating developers to support their WPORG-hosted Themes the ultimate objective? Isn’t the fact that developers are providing that support far more important than the medium they use to provide it?

And the idea of a Support URI actually makes it easier for WPORG support mods to help direct users to the correct support medium, because the Theme developer has helpfully declared where exactly Theme support is provided.

In the end, Theme developers are going to provide support wherever they want, whether we like it or not – and unless we want to try to require developers to provide support (so that we can enforce providing that support in the WPORG forums), saying that WPORG is a hosting, not a listing, site and threatening not to host Themes for which developers provide support elsewhere other than the WPORG forums is futile. (And any attempt to require developers to provide support – in the WPORG forums or anywhere else – would have the single most-chilling effect on Theme submissions of all the Theme Review guidelines.)

So, since we cannot force Theme developers to support their Themes (in the WPORG forums or anywhere else) as a condition of hosting on WPORG, the only ones who ultimately get hurt by not facilitating the developer’s ability to indicate their chosen support medium are the Theme’s end users, and the WPORG support volunteers who have to try to deal with/redirect users to the appropriate support medium.

Thus, we end up with frustrated users and cluttered WPORG support forums with unanswered support questions – both of which reflect poorly on WordPress itself.

OK, I just wrote a very large comment, hit ‘Reply’ and it just disappeared, so I have to be quick this time.

I agree with Emil’s idea s it’s way more convenient for authors to control the support, however Otto’s points make sense for the overall community experience. Regardless, a number of features should be added or improved to these forums so that they could become even remotely useful:

I also have also seen by providing good documentation it is possible to reduce the amount of support tickets and also be able to reply quicker. The only way to provide documentation would be to host on your own site. The question also arises as to how can I search the previous topics of the theme to find answers.

I think it would be also nice to be able to give developers the option to provide premium support for their free themes.

I think a additional option to point users to the official forum would allow developer to give their users better support. The current forums would stay but with the possibility of pointing users to the official forums.

Something else came to mind. How would the WordPress forums handle Support Volunteers. I have been helping Emil with the support of his theme. I have been given privileges to edit and delete posts on his forum. I wrote a post on the translation of Responsive. I have been continually updating it since then. Would this be possible on the WordPress.org forum?http://themeid.com/forum/topic/915/translation-responsive-theme/

I am just trying to show some the limits of supporting users on the WordPress.org forum.

I wouldn’t be so quick to drop the idea until we gauge how more people feel about this. I’ve actually wanted the same thing for a long time.

The truth is that it’s actually the other way around. The theme/plugin forums that are on wordpress.org are the ones causing confusion and fragmentation.

It’s sort of a what came first, the chicken or the egg question. Well I’m willing to bet that most developers, designers, programmers, whatever, already have websites, blogs and forums for their many scripts, widgets, plugins, themes etc.

Contributing a theme/plugin to wordpress.org is fun, provides helpful stats and in some cases has monetary gains if you also sell premium themes.

But, I don’t think most authors are very concerned with losing traffic, that’s not the issue. The problem is that most of us already had forums for handling users/customers long before we ever submitting anything to .org. It’s actually better for everyone, authors and users, to redirect to the official forums instead of having them use a half realized unofficial pseudo-forum (in which authors can’t even get proper notifications about new topics, moderate, organize or really manage to any degree like making stickies for important notes [this may be available to plugin authors, but not for themes]).

I actually had a customer make a refund request for a pro theme on the free theme forum. I didn’t see that for 2 weeks. I’m sure they were upset, obviously confused because of the redundant forum. I’ve since started trying to manually redirect people to the official and correct forum as well as signing up for undependable 3rd party RSS feed services that actually deliver email alerts so I can try and keep track of the extraneous forums created on .org. But, it’s all very less than ideal.

There’s a case for both sides, that’s why it should be an option, not every case is the same. It should be either use the .org native support forum or redirect to your official forum. Deleting our own established forums and/or redirecting users/customers to the .org forums doesn’t make any sense and is a much worse, confusing and fragmented method.

Personally I like the idea of being able to provide a “Support URI” for themes for many of the reasons listed by several posters above (no need to repeat all of them here). I also can appreciate the ideals of having “full” support on the dot-org forums (again for the reasons noted above).

BUT (caps intended) to provide good support on the dot-org forums theme authors (and plugin authors) need more tools and “privileges” to best handle the support requests. Currently what is available is … well … basically not much. Authors for all intent and purpose on dot-org are simply just another poster whereas on their own site they pretty much have carte blanche to do as they see fit. Somewhere in the middle there must be a common ground that allows for all(?) support venues to provide the best support possible.

As noted above(?), the ideal solutions are the ones keeping the end-users the happiest. To which I’ll add, it is not about keeping the authors happy or about keeping dot-org happy. We should be happy to simply have the end-users choosing and continuing to use our works.

I think some way to indicate a preferred support site would be the best.

Occasionally, I or one of my support community monitors will check out the WordPress.org support forums for my theme (Weaver), but mostly that forum gets ignored. Whenever it is checked, the answer is almost always to tell them to go to the “official” theme support forum.

As Edward just said, not much support for the .org theme forums. I’d like to see a preferred link, and maybe an auto-reply capability for anyone posting on wp.org to go to the official site instead. (Cause no matter what, if there are two paths, people will sometimes take the wrong one. And it seems that having the wp.org forum option should not go away.)

But as it stands, posting support questions for my theme (and I expect others with their own support sites) on the WP.org forum is simply an exercise in frustration for everyone involved – users because the answers are infrequent, and then just link to the official site, and the Weaver support community because we really feel bad about letting these people down (but checking out the WP.org forum is just not easy to do automatically.)

TRT aside for a moment: I have been pretty lucky as far as the “ghost” topics, moderators are either handling them directly, or users are being forwarded to my dedicated support, which is my preferred method and not just to keep all answers at the one place but also to reduce the load for WPORG too.

When my Theme was released I did subscribe to RSS feed to get any and all notifications once the questions are posted, at the same time Google alerts are big help as well. When somebody mentions my name, ThemeID or my Theme Google would notify me almost instantaneously and that’s how you can stay on top of it.

Each day I personally post anywhere between 80 to 100 posts on my forum, about the same comes from Ulrich and 10 to 30 from the rest of the TID community. There’s however only few on WPORG, mostly because mod sticked one of the topics and users are being redirected anyways.

Theme/Plugin developers aren’t required to provide support as a condition of having their code hosted by WPORG. Thus, my concern is that expecting (or implicitly requiring, as Otto has done via his comment) Theme (or Plugin) developers to provide support via the WPORG forums is impractical and unenforceable, and that it isn’t the developers, but rather the users, who get hurt in the end.

For many of us, providing official Theme support in the WPORG forums works just fine. But for others – especially, the developers of the most-popular/most-used Themes/Plugins – the WPORG forums don’t provide the necessary tools allow those developers to provide sufficient support to their users. If we aren’t going to facilitate developers to provide support via the medium of their own choosing, then we really need to take this discussion over to make/support, find out what tools/resources developers need in order to provide a sufficient level of support to their users, and then implement their suggestions.

My opinion is that if you have your plugin or theme hosted here, users have a reasonable expectation that you provide some level of support on WPORG. Why? It’s the ‘official’ place to go. It’s already a pain to say “Oh sorry, that’s a paywall theme, you have to go there and ask.”

I’m willing to bring it up on make/support, and ask folks what they think would help them, but if I do, it’s best to limit the scope of that question.

“What tools in the WPORG forums would make it easier for you to support your plugin/theme that is hosted in the WPORG repositories? By this we mean moderation options, like closing posts, etc.”

Instead of replacing “View support forum” or otherwise obfuscating or redirecting the .org forums in any manner, what about a Support URI simply offering up a new button above and in addition to “View support forum”, perhaps “Official support available” that links to the official forum?

That way, it informs the user AND gives them options. Since users are all that this issue concerns, there is simply no downside. I can’t see any reason why this wouldn’t be a perfect compromise.